


the sun from the inside out.

by oceaes



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Canon Compliant, Found Family, Gen, Introspection, Lance (Voltron)-centric, Missing Scene, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Team as Family, and then, kinda almost, or scenes. theres a lot of missing scenes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2020-05-19 15:25:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19359685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oceaes/pseuds/oceaes
Summary: “Who are you?” Is the first thing he ever hears an alien say. It’s not the first time he’s heard someone ask that, which he counts as a victory of sorts.He doesn’t know how to respond, anyways.Who is he?He’s a boy from Cuba, youngest of five, younger twin of two, thoughtwin of twois a little redundant. He’s a pilot, a student at the Galaxy Garrison; the guy who brought a team of five humans barrelling through space in a super-powered Blue Lion.Butwho is he?He doesn’t know.--Written for the Cosmic Dust Zine and the True Colours Fund.





	the sun from the inside out.

**Author's Note:**

> hello! this was my piece for the Cosmic Dust Zine which you can find out about [here](https://cosmicdustzine.tumblr.com)! Its a wonderful project for the True Colours Fund, involving wonderful people and contributors so please please check it out and donate if you can.
> 
> \--
> 
>  _"Whatever makes you feel like the sun_  
>  from the inside out  
> chase that."  
> \- Gemma Troy

**the sun from the inside out.**

**_I_ **

Lance breathes for the first time at the same time as someone else.

Pudgy fingers grip tightly to themselves as screams echo in dissonance around the hospital room; and then he breathes and breathes and he doesn’t stop. He gulps up air like he is eager to run, like he’s been waiting for the opportunity to breathe for nine long months.

“They’re beautiful,” Theresa Suárez says, a little girl pressed to one shoulder and a little boy pressed to the other. She does not think of the spotlight split in half as it stretches itself to cast across both babies, or of all the things they will be meant to share in the future.

 _“Leandro and Raquel,”_ Theresa says nearly a thousand times that night. “ _Your new baby siblings,”_ or “ _your new niece and nephew.”_

They are born under starlight; during the thickest part of the night.

They share a home and a surname and a birthdate, the spotlight craning to accommodate just how _much_ the two of them are. Just how much they will become. Their birth is a shared affair, but for the moment, Theresa lets it be just that.

Time passes, they grow up but never apart. _Lance and Rachel,_ the kids at school call them when they move to the United States. No one ever corrects them.

Lance is born during the thickest part of the night. He is born under starlight.

He is made from it, too.

**_II_ **

Lance meets Hunk on his first day of grade one.

He is scrawling stars and cartoonish spaceships across the pad of his notebook when someone plops down in the desk next to his.

“That’s really cool,” the boy says with a toothy grin and hair that flops over a band tied around his head, “I love space!”

Lance scratches the side of his nose with his pencil, not quite sure of what to say. He sits in the middle of the classroom, always surrounded by people, which somehow makes the always empty neighbouring desk seem even lonelier. The smiling boy next to him tilts his head, waiting for a response. Lance thumps his elbow over his notebook.

“Me too,” he says. The other boy’s smile only widens.

By the end of the day, they’re scratching constellations and big-headed aliens into the margins of Lance’s math homework.

**_III_ **

By fourth grade, the two of them have commandeered the big tree past the soccer field of their elementary school playground.

 _“It’s like we’re on top of the world!”_ Lance had exclaimed the first lunch they spent away from the rest of the kids in their grade.

 _“We’re not even, like, on a hill,”_ Hunk had laughed back. Lance shook his head.

 _“It doesn’t matter how_ high _we are,”_ he said, _“it matters how_ far _we are.”_

He wonders if Hunk had believed him. He wonders if he believes himself.

“My spaceship is gonna have a laser gun that shoots out the front,” Lance says now as he scribbles across the open notebook splayed across their laps.

Hunk chuckles, “for what? All the meteors that you’ll have to smash through?”.

“The _aliens,_ Hunk.”

“Who’s to say that aliens are bad, though?”

“Idunno,” Lance says idly, “Marco.”

They spend most days like this, away from the rest of the world. Away but together.

Lance has always been fond of _away,_ wants it like he wants the water of Varadero to crash against him again. Gulps it up like oxygen. The stars were out when he came to be, there has to be a reason for that. That has to mean something.

“I’m gonna be a pilot.” Lance hears himself say.

Hunk wrinkles his nose in confusion next to him, “I know,” he says, “I want to be a pilot, too.”

They talk about it all the time. About taking off, about the away.

Lance’s eyes lift from where they’ve been fixed to his notebook. He gazes across the field at the other kids all running up slides and swinging across monkey-bars.

“I’m serious,” he says.

“Me too.”

They’ve talked about this before, about what they want to do with their lives and why they want to do it, and it always comes down to “ _I want to see the universe,”_ for Hunk and “ _I want to be remembered_ ,” for Lance.

(“ _We all want to be remembered,”_ Hunk always says, and Lance doesn’t know how to explain that it’s less about being remembered and more about not being forgotten.)

“I’m going to apply for the Galaxy Garrison,” Lance says to the grass in front of them. It’s a frightening confession, to state it bare faced, stripped of any ambiguity. Lance barely recognizes his own voice.

“Me too,” Hunk replies simply.

Lance fidgets with the coil of the notebook. “I’m scared that I’m going to be rejected.” He mumbles, the wind picking up and blowing the words back into his mouth. _Keep the fear, kid. You’ll need it._

“So am I,” Hunk says. They’re good at that, the two of them, being afraid. Letting it grasp them by the shoulders and spoon-feed them doubt.

Hunk is looking at him the way he looks at a knot he’s trying to detangle. Lips pulled into a line, hands fidgeting in his lap. Lance watches as the fear is breathed out from him, catching on the wind and blowing back into their mouths. Lance holds his breath.

“But, we’ll never know unless we try, right?” Hunk bumps Lance’s shoulder. “So I say we might as well try.”

**_IV_ **

Space is tricky and fidgety and delicate. Lance has never quite learned how to handle delicate.

“Who are you?” Is the first thing he ever hears an alien say. It’s not the first time he’s heard someone ask that, which he counts as a victory of sorts.

He doesn’t know how to respond, anyways. _Who is he?_

He’s a boy from Cuba, youngest of five, younger twin of two, though _twin of two_ is a little redundant. He’s a pilot, a student at the Galaxy Garrison; the guy who brought a team of five humans barreling through space in a superpowered Blue Lion.

But _who is he?_ He doesn’t know.

**_V_ **

Allura finds him one night, somewhere between the bridge and the right wing. It’s a big ship, a twisting, shifting ship that Lance still can’t manage to commit to memory, even after nearly five months of living within its walls.

“What’s the matter?” Allura asks kindly, eyebrows furrowing as she falls into step beside him.

Lance shrugs, “I guess I’m a little homesick.”

Allura’s eyes turn gentle, understanding. “You miss your family?” With the look on her face, it doesn’t seem like a question. She sighs a shaky breath that she swallows down as soon as it leaves her. “I do, too, sometimes.”

Lance looks away. Tries to fight off the anger of knowing that she will never see her favourite flowers grow again. That she will never feel the water of Altea crash against her. It’s not his anger, anyways. Not his to hold and to fight every day. But he holds it along with her, presses his palms to the underside of the aggression and bares his teeth at anything that tries to poke its way out. He thinks that’s enough, for now, at least.

“But, I’m going to tell you a secret,” Allura turns to him, holds her hands out like she’s presenting her anger to him frankly. When he looks down, though, there is no anger, no battleground or warrior fingertips; just hands, just shaking hands held sturdy by surviving. Lance takes them.

“I have lost a family;” Allura says when he looks her in the eye. He swallows thickly at the intensity of her gaze, the intensity of her words, “but I have found one, too.”

**_VI_ **

“Lance?”

“Hmm?”

“What do you think?”

He turns the orange device over between his hands, tracing the smooth edges until his fingers catch on a corner. Pidge sits next to him, laptop glowing bright against the darkness of his barren room. She had run in ten minutes ago, bouncing onto the foot of his bed where he had been reading an old Altean folk tale.

“Look at this,” she’d said, and pressed the shiny orange rectangle to his hand.

When he turned it over, it had flashed on like a cell phone display.

“I managed to take the data from your phone and program most of it into this thing. It actually charges, so it’s almost like having your phone back.”

Ten minutes later, and Lance is reading the email that changed his life.

_Dear Mr. Suárez, It is with great pleasure that we inform you of your acceptance to the Galaxy Garrison…_

“Lance?” Pidge tries again, poking his leg. He breathes out slowly through his nose.

“This is amazing,” he says, eyes scanning over old messages and saved photos. Pidge looks at him over the rim of her glasses, nodding a little when he looks up from his screen. “Thanks, Pidge.”

“You’re welcome.”

“You didn’t have to do this, you know.”

The corner of her mouth lifts, “I know. I wanted to.”

Lance shakes his head and lets out a bewildered laugh he hadn't even known was bubbling in his mouth. 

“Besides,” Pidge says, “I needed another project after programming Green’s cloaking device, and fixing Red's flashing screen, and hacking into—”

“Okay, I get it,” he kicks her across the bed. She yelps and throws herself toward the wall.“Know-it-all,” he says affectionately, clutching the space phone tightly when she tries to playfully kick him back.

Earth sits in his palms in the shape of a flat orange device with grey corners. Earth is held in his palms; tangible, for whatever that’s worth. He thinks it's worth a lot.

Pidge’s eyes sparkle when she speaks again, “don’t you forget it.”

**_VII_ **

The team falls together on the couches in the lounge.

Boisterous laughter and flailing limbs fold the seven of them into each other as they celebrate another victorious recruitment to their alliance.

“Man, that was a good plan, Shiro.” Pidge says from where she’s practically splayed over the couch. “Did you see the look on that one Galra’s face? They looked like they were about to explode.”

They laugh for hours, they smile for some of them, too. Keith and him end up in an arm-wrestling competition. Lance wins 2-1.

Sometime in the middle, Coran leaves to locate the coordinates of their next destination, and Pidge sets herself up on her laptop in the corner of the room. Hunk lazes across one of the benches, Lance propped up at his feet as he tries to throw purple space snacks into Keith’s mouth from across the room.

It’s nice, to laugh like a family; to have found a family all on his own.

The team falls together, and then it falls apart.

**_VIII_ **

Shiro is gone and it feels like the universe stops entirely.

Black freezes when Lance touches her, locks him out and that’s okay. He plays it up in front of his team, pretends he’s hungry for the leader position. Pretends all he wants is a little authority. He doesn’t tell them that even thousands of kilometers away from Earth, — the abundance of space squeezing between him and home and sister and ambition — he still feels like the spotlight is splitting in half. Breaking the lense and shattering the bulb in a shower of sparks.

He pretends like the glow of being _important_ is one he knows like the waves of Varadero Beach.

Black freezes him out, pushes his sigh of defeat back into his mouth before he leaves the cockpit for good. _Keep this,_ Lance thinks he hears Black say to him, _you are not ready now, but you will be._

Lance holds his breath until he steps outside.

**_IX_ **

“I think we should split up.”

“What?” Keith whips his head around to stare at Lance in question.

“There’s no time to work out strategy right now,” Lance begins, crouching behind a wall as a fleet of Galra soldiers rush passed them. _Thud, thud, thud, thud._ “We have two targets here, and we’ll get neither of them if we stay all grouped together _._ ”

“And what would splitting up do?” Pidge asks from around the corner. “Completely obliterate our plan _and_ our man-power?”

 Lance throws his arms in the air, “I don’t _know,_ I just know that we can’t all stay here in one big cluster. We’re like sitting ducks, only ducks would probably survive this situation because I don’t think the Galra even _know_ what a duck is.”

“Lance,” Keith says calmly, gripping Lance’s forearm, “what’s your plan?”

“To become a duck.”

_“Lance.”_

“Their control room is down that hallway,” he says, “and the power source is through _there,_ so I think Hunk and Pidge should head to the controls while Keith and Lura go for the power.” He says definitively.

“And what about you?” Keith asks, Bayard gripped tightly over his shoulder. They’re running out of time.

“I can draw the fire,” he decides, “down the middle; they can’t chase all of us at once.”

“You can’t take an entire Galra force!” Pidge reprimands, “I don’t care how good of a shot you are, you won’t be able to shoot them all at once.”

Lance taps the tip of his gun to the panel to the right of the door in front of them “If I shoot this out, the door will automatically close. Then I’ll have a good ten seconds to lock the next door before the Galra are back on my tail.”

_Thud, thud, thud, thud..._

The team all shares a look, half of them ready to grab Lance by the back of his suit and drag him along with them. _No martyr needed today. No lone wolf left to fend for himself._

“Splitting up is our only chance at winning this.” Lance tries again. “Or we can all become ducks.”

Pidge rolls her eyes, opens her mouth to argue when the sound of foot soldiers _thud, thud, thudding_ down the corridor they just came from shocks them back into motion.

Keith squeezes Lances arm. “You’re right,” he says, “there’s no way we can get to both if we don’t split up.”

Lance sighs curtly, bayard transforming in his hand as he prepares for the attack coming their way. _Thud, thud, thud..._

“Lance?” Lance lifts his eyes to meet Keith’s, “I trust you,” he says, “and if you think you can take them, then you should.”

Lance shakes his head once in affirmation, “I can,” he says.

Keith nods soberly, “good luck, then, Sharpshooter.” And then he and Allura are rushing to the right, while Pidge and Hunk take off to the left.

Lance waits, the Galra’s footsteps becoming almost deafening as they move towards where he's hiding.

_Thud, thud, thud…_

He shoots out the first door.

**_X_ **

War blends together, when he’s been fighting it for so long.

He throws himself into it; doesn’t remember half the battles they’ve fought. Half the things they’ve lost and all the things they’ve won. Teammates come and go and it feels like splitting up was taken too far. The team always stays, and he knows they always will, but it feels like they're back to floating around each other as opposed to forged together.

“Alright there, Number Three?” Coran says gently, clapping him on the shoulder as he comes up behind him.

“Yeah,” Lance says, Earth projected in front of him the way Coran had showed him the first time he had felt the overwhelming need to go home. “Just thinking.”

“What about?”

Lance shrugs the shoulder Coran isn’t holding to his ear, “do you think we’ll ever get back there?” he asks, but he means more than just Earth.

_Do you think we’ll ever get back to that? Where everything was normal and the team was set in stone, not a kite made from a house of cards?_

“One day,” Coran affirms, “you’ll get to go home, when the time is right.”

“When's that gonna be?”

Coran squeezes his shoulder, Lance feels the warmth of it spread throughout his chest. Coran has always cared for him, Lance knows, and he finds comfort in the arm that slings across his back. “When the war is won,” Coran says, “when this is all over.”

“And then we’ll go back?” Lance asks.

Coran nods resolutely, “then you will go back home.” He points to the hologram of Earth floating in front of them when he speaks next. “Chin up, Number Three, we’ll be there soon.”

**_XI_ **

War trudges on, he’s knocked around a bit, and then he’s knocked too hard.

It’s fitting, Lance supposes, that this time he has to leave so that Keith can return. Some twisted push and pull that he had demanded they be.

But Red blows life back into his lungs, _you are not done yet. You cannot leave._ So Lance comes back. He is granted a second chance at life under starlight. Thinks it’s rather fitting.

Time passes, war passes in a blur, until— “we’re going home,” Lance hears, and then repeats it like a mantra.

 _We’re going home._ Maybe then, they can finally go _back._

**_XII_ **

Keith is on the team again, and Shiro is, too. Though Lance is still reeling from the knowledge that Shiro had ever been off it.

Having the two of them back at the same time makes the nostalgia of their old team dynamic that much more potent.

 _“I have lost a family,”_ Allura had said to him once, _“but I have found one, too.”_ Lance wants to find his again.

“Hey, Lance,” Shiro says as he stumbles out of Red. They’re on some in between planet. _Halfway home_ , is all Lance can really think of it as.

Keith and Shiro are sat on the ground, backs pressed up against Black as they quietly converse and chew on their breakfasts.

“Sorry,” Lance mutters, already turning around, “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

“No worries. You can sit with us, if you want?”

Lance opens his mouth to say no, thank you. Turns his shoulders around to start back through Red’s mouth where he just came through. But he catches himself. The wind from the opening door blowing his denial back into his mouth.

 _I have found one, too._ “Okay,” Lance says, “thank you.” His answer is met with two warm smiles.

The three of them are an awkward fit. All hardened by war, the familiarity that once floated between them now stretching thin. Keith and Shiro, however, always find something to say to each other, and Lance suspects that that will never change. The thought makes him smile despite himself.

Keith is asked sometime later to assist Coran with the fetching of supplies in the forest.

Shiro rumples his hair before he leaves.

“Y’know,” Shiro says, as Keith’s back disappears into the masses of trees, “when Keith was little, he used to draw those, too.” He points to one of Lance’s old notebooks that he had found in the Space Mall. Half the pages are vacant, the Cepheus constellation drawn on the front in thick black lines. Lance had offered it as fire-burning material.

Lance smiles at his shoes, “I didn’t know Keith drew.”

Shiro shrugs, “he’s always had a knack for art, I think.”

“He must be good, then.”

“He is.” Shiro sounds like he really means it.

“You’re a really good brother,” Lance doesn’t mean for it to come out choked, but he feels his throat close off halfway through his words. “To Keith, I mean.”

Shiro’s expression is unreadable, and they sit an arm’s length apart in silence as Lance swallows against the swelling of tears in his eyes and throat. It’s still strange to talk to Shiro, the effects of Haggar and her clone still leaving Lance rattled with the guilt of not knowing sooner. He had suspected for a long time that something was off, never would he have guess _what_.

Shiro’s face softens after a moment, his mouth pushing outwards and to the side. “But not to you?”

Lance is silent.

Shiro nods solemnly, scoots himself over until they’re sitting right next to each other. It doesn’t take more than that for the Blue Paladin to turn into his arms.

 _“I have lost a family,”_ Allura’s words ring in his head.

Shiro pats him reassuringly where his arms are twisted around his shoulders. _“But I have found one, too.”_

“Yeah,” Lance mumbles into the front of Shiro’s shirt, he hopes he can hear him, hopes he understands it all the same. “To me, too.”

**_XIII_ **

The team falls together after their final victory, and it’s almost as if they had never fallen apart in the first place. The Garrison lounges are bigger than the ones in the Castle, giant chairs and couches like centrepieces in the brightly lit room.

“I guess this is the last big win for Team Voltron, huh?” Keith says. Hunk knocks on the wooden coffee table at his feet.

Allura cocks her eyebrow at the gesture. “Earth thing?”

“Earth thing.”

They laugh for hours, smile for some of them, too, and Lance wonders how they could have ever strayed so far from one another to not have this.

Hunk leans back against Lances bent knees, flops himself almost off the couch as he dozes off.

“I think the exhaustion has kicked in,” Coran says, “maybe we should all rest for the night.”

Shiro nods from where he’s sprawled out on the floor, elbow bent over his eyes to filter out the light. Keith pokes his toe into Shiro’s side. “Wake up,” he says. Shiro swats blindly at his ankle.

It’s nice, to finally laugh like a family again; to have found a family all on his own.

**_XIV_ **

“And who are you?” The reporter tilts her microphone to Lance’s chest, smile toothy in a way that reminds him of cartoonish spaceships and aliens with too-big heads.

It’s not the first time he’s heard someone ask that, which he counts as a victory of sorts.

_Who is he?_

He’s a boy from Cuba, youngest of five, younger twin of two. He’s a pilot, a former student of the Galaxy Garrison. He’s the Blue Paladin of Voltron, Defender of the Universe. A boy who was born and reborn under starlight. A boy who has known so much love in his life, as soon as he learned how to find it.

His team is smiling at him, stood in the middle of the bunch. Surrounded for the first time in a way that is anything but lonely.

But _who is he?_

“Lance,” he says, and feels the spotlight finally snap back together, wires old and fumbly, bulb’s glow dimmed with time. But it’s his, and for the first time, he shares it willingly with the team who has taught him the glow of being important.

It feels like starlight.

It’s made from it, too.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! 
> 
> again, the zine that this and many other pieces are apart of is the [Cosmic Dust Zine,](https://cosmicdustzine.tumblr.com) and if you want to find more of me and my stuff, you can check me out on [tumblr.](https://oceaes.tumblr.com)


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